Anonymous promises to disrupt Obama’s State of the Union
RT,
13
February, 2013
Eyes
and ears will be on US President Barack Obama Tuesday evening as he
presents the State of the Union address from Capitol Hill in
Washington, DC. Hacktivists aligned with the Anonymous movement have
other plans, however.
A
call to arms has been issued by Anonymous, the shadowy underground
collective of hackers and activists, and the group says they hope to
disrupt select online broadcasts of the annual address in protest of
President Obama and his administration’s assaults on the civil
liberties and constitutional rights of Americans, as well as the
world’s Internet.
“Operation
SOTU,” or “OpSOTU,” is latest mission from Anonymous, and
members involved in the initiative say it will serve as a decisive
factor in the “battle
royale for the future of the Internet.”
In
a statement drafted
by members of Anonymous and circulated on the Web early Tuesday, the
group recalls a series of recent victories for Internet activists who
waged battles and won against proposed legislation that would have
drastically changed the modern landscape of computer and technology
law.
“Last
year we faced our greatest threat from lawmakers. We faced down SOPA,
PIPA, CISPA and ACTA,” the
message begins. “But
that victory did not come easily. Nor did it come without a price.”
While
the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act were
killed in Congress before they could come to fruition, opponents of
those bills argue that Washington’s assault on computer users has
only escalated in the year since. In January, 26-year-old anti-SOPA
advocate Aaron
Swartz was
found dead of an apparent suicide in the midst of a heated legal
battle with the US Justice
Department over his allegedly unauthorized
downloading of academic and journal files from the website JSTOR.
Other young technologists, including those accused of hacking the
Stratfor intelligence firm as members of Anonymous, are
facing life in
prison for nonviolent computer
crimes.
But
despite calls for the White House and Washington to relinquish their
mission to censor the Internet and strip online freedoms away from
Americans, a war against overzealous cybersecurity legislation
remains rampant. In lieu of reform — reform even advocated by
some members of
Congress — both the Executive and Legislative branches alike are
preparing to push for new rules that some say will only ruin the
Internet.
Pres.
Obama is believed to
have already signed a cybersecurity executive
order this
week that, when unveiled, is expected to include privacy-damning
provisions that will put in place a direct plan of action for the
private sector to share consumer information with the government.
According to some reports, the order could be made public as soon as
during Tuesday evening’s address. On Wednesday, however, the
architects of last year’s Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection
Act, or CISPA,
plan to reintroduce their bill during a seminar in Washington,
rekindling a mission Anonymous says would turn “private
companies into government informants.” Regardless
of if either is discussed during Tuesday night’s address, however,
hacktivists are preemptively asking for a world-wide attack on the
State of the Union to be led by a legion of Anons.
“We
reject the State of the Union. We reject the authority of the
President to sign arbitrary orders and bring irresponsible and
damaging controls to the Internet,” Anonymous
writes.
“The President of the United States of America, and the Joint
Session of Congress will face an Army tonight.”
“There
will be no State of the Union Address on the web tonight.”
Anonymous
is asking for people around the globe to prepare for an online battle
Tuesday evening that will take a multi-prong approach in hopes of
rendering some Internet streams of the president’s address
unavailable and educating the world’s about his administration’s
ruthless interpretation of both computer law and the US Constitution
alike. In addition to waging a distributed denial-of-service attack
(DDoS) against websites carrying the SOTU stream, Anons also plan to
spam Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other social media sites with
information about the president’s cybersecurity order, CISPA and
other items likely to be left out of Tuesday’s speech.
“He
will not be covering the NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act],
an act of outright tyrannical legislation allowing for indefinite
detention of citizens completely outside due process and the rule of
law,” reads
the press release in part. “He
will not be covering the extra-judicial and unregulated
justifications for targeted killings of citizens by military drones
within the borders of America, or the fact that Orwellian newspeak
had to be used to make words like ‘imminent’ mean their
opposite.”
Elsewhere,
Anonymous attacks the president’s hesitance to publically discuss
Private first class Bradley
Manning,
the 25-year-old accused whistleblower who has been imprisoned without
trial for nearly 1,000 days for allegedly leaking information about
the United States’ own war crimes. Nor will he discuss, claims
Anonymous, “the
secret interpretations of law that allow for warrant-less wiretapping
and surveillance of any US citizen without probably cause of criminal
acts.”
Indeed,
the matters of Pfc Manning and the recent renewal of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and other Fourth
Amendment-eroding legislation have been by-and-large removed from
talking points touched on by the president during his first term in
office. Next, Anonymous fears, a tightening grip on the Internet
could mean even more infringement, authorized by an administration
that aims to gain control of the world’s main method of
communication.
“We
will form a virtual blockade between Capitol Hill and the
Internet,” warns
Anonymous. In a separate statement
issued by the AnonRelations sect, one member writes, “President
Obama and the State of the Union Address will be BANISHED from the
Internet for the duration of live delivery.”
“This
action is being taken to underline a fact that appears to be sorely
unrecognized by the Obama Administration — that the Internet is a
sovereign territory, and does not fall under the jurisdiction of any
nation state.”
In
a public discussion held for planning purposes online, one Anon
writes,
“Anyone and everyone on the Internet who opposes the current
efforts by the US government to control the Internet and their
actions against liberty at home and abroad will be DIRECTLY ENGAGED
in LULZ WARFARE.” The
group has since collected a number of news links relating to relevant
White House policies and the URLs for websites that might be
momentarily brought down by a coordinated DDoS attack, including the
official White House stream for the president’s address. FBI.gov,
House.gov and the website for C-SPAN have all been listed as
potential targets as well.
“Armed
with nothing more than Lulz, Nyancat and PEW-PEW-PEW! Lazers, we will
face down the largest superpower on Earth,” the
AnonRelations bulletin reads.
OpLastResort,
the Anonymous-led mission launched in retribution for the death of
Aaron Swartz that is largely attributed to alleged prosecutorial
overreach by the Obama administration, has endorsed the planned
assault on the State of the Union. On the website OpLastResort.com,
the administrator insists there will be no State of the Union
broadcast on the Web “for
freedom, for Aaron Swartz, for the Internet, and of course, for the
lulz.” A
member of AnonRelations calls the latest action a continuation of
OpLastResort, but also “a
direct response to intelligence gathered about upcoming executive
order.”
Since
Mr. Swartz’ passing in December, Anonymous has hacked into
a database of Federal
Reserve emergency
numbers, defaced the website of the US
Sentencing Commission and
posted the log-in credentials for over 4,000 US banking executives on
a hacked frontpage for the Alabama Criminal Justice Information
Center. When asked whether he thought these maneuvers were making a
difference, former Anonymous member Gregg Housh tells RT that the
operations are not going unrecognized.
“I
think the ops are having an interesting effect,” Housh
says in an online chat hours before Tuesday’s State of the Union
Address. “It
has their attention . . . in a way I haven’t seen before.”
“I
think something is happening,” adds
Housh, “it
is just happening at the pace at which Washington is used to going,
and the Internet is used to ‘Internet time,’ which is much
faster.”
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